First impressions of Designers Cut:
Why have you done this? The interface, I mean. You had the beginnings of a good, smooth UI, with drag and drop to load and unload the cargo. The problem was that you mis-prioritized the actions so that a mouse drag was 1 quantity, instead of the max quantity. The problem with the rest of the interface was that you did not extend that concept to the other parts of the Strategic view, for example, fleet management - the building of new ships and placing them into a new fleet, or moving a ship from one fleet to the next, etc....
With Designers Cut, you have removed those first steps at a good user interface, and replaced it with a horribly tedious multi-click, multi-mouse-movement, multi-tab, very unnatural and overly complex interface. You have released a product that has changed the interface, and committed the cardinal sin of not improving it, but instead making it worse. It is very clumsy, very amateur, and it really detracts from the experience of the game.
What is maddening from a user-perspective is that underneath this horror, you have a really fantastic game. And creating that game is the *really* difficult job, the huge cost overhead, all of the hours put into coding and testing and debugging. You did a great job.
But after you have painstakingly sculpted this Venus, you slapped a couple of buckets of the cheapest paint on it and added a price tag. You've insulted your own work.
Please, for the love of Pete, hire someone who knows how to design an interface.
PS - The Port Information page - you can't run the clock with this dialog up? That's just cruel!
Why have you done this? The interface, I mean. You had the beginnings of a good, smooth UI, with drag and drop to load and unload the cargo. The problem was that you mis-prioritized the actions so that a mouse drag was 1 quantity, instead of the max quantity. The problem with the rest of the interface was that you did not extend that concept to the other parts of the Strategic view, for example, fleet management - the building of new ships and placing them into a new fleet, or moving a ship from one fleet to the next, etc....
With Designers Cut, you have removed those first steps at a good user interface, and replaced it with a horribly tedious multi-click, multi-mouse-movement, multi-tab, very unnatural and overly complex interface. You have released a product that has changed the interface, and committed the cardinal sin of not improving it, but instead making it worse. It is very clumsy, very amateur, and it really detracts from the experience of the game.
What is maddening from a user-perspective is that underneath this horror, you have a really fantastic game. And creating that game is the *really* difficult job, the huge cost overhead, all of the hours put into coding and testing and debugging. You did a great job.
But after you have painstakingly sculpted this Venus, you slapped a couple of buckets of the cheapest paint on it and added a price tag. You've insulted your own work.
Please, for the love of Pete, hire someone who knows how to design an interface.
PS - The Port Information page - you can't run the clock with this dialog up? That's just cruel!